Is this what the punitive 3% stamp duty is intended to do?

* Push up rents, leading to more people sharing more overcrowded homes and more homelessness.

* Push up rents, so the so-called ‘generation rent’ have even less chance of being able to save a deposit.

* Discourage developers from building property which sells largely to investors, such as city centre apartments, putting the brakes on much needed economic regeneration of our cities. (As George Osborne said: “We are the builders.” How droll.)

* Encourage new development sites to be left standing empty, because investors don’t want to buy them, even though there is a need for the accommodation.

* Reduce the supply of student accommodation, so students have to pay higher rents, and accumulate bigger student debts. (While, in another move, they will have to meet higher student loan repayments.)

* Undermine the buy to let mortgage market – an increasingly important part of the mortgage market.

* Put the livelihoods of tens of thousand of people who work in the property lettings and property maintenance business in jeopardy, to say nothing of the construction sector.

* Encourage those fortunate landlords who can afford it to leave their rental properties empty because no other investors want to buy them, even though there is a need for the accommodation.

* Encourage fewer people to invest in property to help secure their future, so more people are reliant on state aid when they retire.

* Send the message that the UK is not a fair, free open market and that, somehow, it is wrong to try and make money.

* Add another totally baffling layer of bureaucracy to the Stamp Duty system – something which has only just been simplified. (And which in any case is hardly a fair or logical tax anyway.)

* Encourage investors to be economical with the truth when buying property as to what they intend to do with it. These are hardly people who are likely to make good landlords.

* Encourage more big companies and foreign money into the property market – one of the main driving factors behind a lot of the problems in the property market today.

(Will these big companies offer a better service and cheaper rents to tenants than small private landlords do? Hmm.)

* Not make it the slightest bit easier or cheaper for owner occupiers to buy (if that was the intention of the idea of it all anyway). Demand will still be high, supply will still be low, and prices will still rise.

What do you think?

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